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Hollis first attempted to join SIS in 1938 but was rejected, the reason being ill health , however he was accepted by MI5 in 1939. For the next six years he worked on the Russian desk. A born bureaucrat, Hollis was promoted to deputy director in 1953 and director three years later. After being knighted by the queen, Hollis retired in 1965.
In 1945 Gouzenko, a GRU Officer at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa defected, exposing a vast Soviet spy network. Hollis was the man chosen to go to Canada to debrief the defector. Kim Philby, the Soviet double agent working inside MI6, was supposed to perform this chore but was busy hushing up another defector. In Hollis' debriefing of Gouzenko he was told there was an important Soviet mole deep inside British Intelligence Section Five, which was taken by the ant-Hollis brigade as meaning MI5, but could indeed refer to R5 of MI6 which could then refer to Philby, Hollis faithfully reported Gouzenkos statements in full to his superiors in London. Still later, it was said that Hollis was the man who, in 1963 warned Kim Philby that he was about to be interrogated by MI5, information that caused Philby to leave Beirut and escape to the Soviet Union. In that same year Hollis is accused of failing to warn Harold Macmillan that the Soviet GRU spy Yevgeny Ivanov was at the centre of a scandal involving War Minister John Profumo and a number of call girls supposedly run by society osteopath, Stephen Ward.
Hollis was also accused of being too supportive of the traitor and Soviet agent Sir Anthony Blunt when he was given immunity in exchange for his confession in 1964. Hollis was under such a cloud of suspicion that he was later asked to return to MI5 offices where he volunteered to be grilled by his accusers. Hollis repeatedly denied having anything to do with Soviet espionage and Sir Martin Furnivall Jones, his replacement as Director-General rightly allowed the matter to drop. A decade later, Margaret Thatcher admitted that Hollis had been interviewed but stated that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing. There is little doubt that in the absence of new and highly damning evidence to the contrary, that Hollis must be considered one of the most 'wronged' officers in British security history. His innocence has been supported by many impartial intelligence sources and such leading figures as Sir Dick White, the only officer to head both MI5 and SIS (MI6). Even following the collapse of Communism and the access allowed to former Soviet intelligence archives; not one single shred of believable evidence has been discovered to prove that Hollis was ever a spy for the NKVD, KGB or the GRU. |
